Hugo Bettauer's The Blue Stain, a unique of racial blending and "passing," starts off and results in Georgia but additionally takes the reader to Vienna and ny. First released in 1922, the unconventional tells thestory of Carletto, son of a white eu educational and an African American daughter of former slaves, who, having handed as white in Europe and fled to the US after wasting his fortune, resists being visible as "black" sooner than eventually accepting that identification and becoming a member of the early circulate for civil rights. by no means sooner than translated into English, this can be the 1st novel during which a German-speaking eu writer addresses early twentieth-century racial politics within the usa - not just within the South but additionally within the North. there's a real understatement, in spite of the fact that: whereas Bettauer's narrative goals to sanction a white/European egalitarianism with admire to race, it however shows its personal model of racism by means of announcing that African americans desire wide enculturation earlier than they're to be valuedas people. the unconventional as a result serves as a special old account of transnational and transcultural racial attitudes of the interval that proceed to reverberate in our current globalized world.

Hugo Bettauer (1872-1925) was once a prolific Austrian author and journalist, a truly early sufferer of the Nazis. Peter Höyng is affiliate Professor of German experiences at Emory collage. Chauncey J. Mellor is Professor of German on the collage of Tennessee, Knoxville. Kenneth R. Janken is Professor of African American and Diaspora reviews on the collage of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.